it could still be fun to try, i just found a pcb drawing tool (http://www.sunstone.com/pcb-resources/Downloads.aspx) that can import a lot of formats and can tell what the final price would be

only thing needed is a pcb layout and parts list to start from, if sunstone can not find some of the parts then it would just be a matter of finding a part that can be used instead

and i guess that just just changeing ethernet and such would mean that it is a whole new pcb layout and as such no one can claim right for it anymore

the hard part is the software, i guess that everything would have to done from scratch... but maybe some "guru"'s from here could do that?

Someone did start writing a replacement player, but I don't recall if it was ever opensourced. It didn't really get very far, and, as best I could tell, its introduction to the add-on software pool met a very lukewarm response. There are a limited number of gurus on this board who are capable of rewriting the player app from scratch, and most (if not all) of them have shown absolutely no inclination in doing so when the topic has come up in the past. This is one of those itches that, if you want it scratched, you're going to have to scratch it yourself.

Cheers,

yeah.... i think the idea is going the pile of "never know when going to start/end" projects

That player software is called "Squash".

http://empegbbs.com/ubbthreads.php/ubb/showflat/Number/206260/fpart/1

well, how many parts can have gone out of the market?

of course it's a big work to put the player (with upgraded hardware) back in production, but at least we could make the pcb and schmatics, which does not cost a single penny if we use the tool i provided more early in this thread

again the hardest part must be construct the player software, but with all be guru's in here i dont think it's a problem, rather a matter of the time they have to do it

just my 0.02 $

Probably lots of them.


But why would any of us here want to do that ? I can think of only two reasons, one to sell to other people and two so that we had more players ourselves.

Empeg/Rio pretty much demonstrated that there isn't a big market for an expensive in car mp3 player. If you did another small production run of the empeg then you'd end up with an even more expensive product that the original empeg. So that is a non-starter.

As to the second reason, I'm a fairly sure that most if not all of us here have as many empegs as we need and if you want another one you only really have to wait a month for a very affordable one to appear on ebay or here. So why would any of us want to spend money on the most expensive empegs ever ?

I think you hugely underestimate the amount of effort that would be involved to recreate the player software with anything approaching the quality, reliability, performance and functionality of the existing empeg player software.

It is a real shame the player code wasn't open source or at least extensible, but it isn't. No one here is going to invest the many man years that would be involved to create a new player for the empeg that matched the existing one on the qualities I listed above. It would be different if the existing software wasn't very good, but it is excellent.

Sure the existing player could be improved on, but that would involve massive effort just to get to the point we are at now with the existing player, before you could start making those improvements. You could of course skip some of the existing player code. I don't have much use for the visualizations, I don't use the EQ, rear speakers, Wave files, Wendy filters and an bunch of other stuff. But then lots of other people do want and use those features, so if you wanted lots of people to use and test it for you you'd have to implement them all.

I'm not at all sure that is true you know. A lot of work by very experienced people (Patrick and Hugo) went into laying out the empeg boards.

Just throwing the schematics (even if you could get access to them) at an automatic tool isn't going to get the quality product that the empeg is.

the tool for creating the pcb/schmatics do a display of the price for the "ready to build in case" pcb, at least that is what i understand, and if we had a part or maybe the whole of the org. pcb designing an upgraded pcb would not be a big problem, the only problem i can se would be the time to do it

as for the software i AGREE, it's a big damn shame that it is not opensource, a lot of improvements could have been done, all of the nice work mark have done with hijack could have been a part of the player software so that we only had to load the player software, one way to create a new player software could be to reverse the org. player and merge it with hijack (if that at all can be done?) the new software will no longer look like the org. player and hence no one can claim rights on it...

if i had the skills i would have started on this a long time ago, but i'm a "monkey" at both programming and designing a pcb, the only thing i'm good at is repairing and put things together by an instruction/guide, also i have a tons of ideas that demands more than normal willing to do them

Just because you can feed a schematic into a PCB routing package doesn't mean what you get out will be any good. For one thing the auto routing is usually terrible and you'll have a massive PCB with a billion vias everywhere. Another problem is that the empeg bus combines digital signals, analog signals and power supplies all into one board.

As I said previously, quite a few of the parts are very hard to find and discontinued. The CPU and DSP are two that have been discontinued years ago now.

If you're going to have to replace them with something else then you'd want new faster/better parts. If you're doing such a major redesign anyway then you might as well start from scratch.


You can already make a single upgrade file that combines the player software with Mark's kernel. Its been like that since the empeg first came out. It is just redistributing the resulting package that has issues.


No. Merging a userland program into the kernel would just be nasty and also incredibly hard. Reverse engineering the player is possible but you might as well reimplement it from scratch to save time and also not have any potential legal issues.


Doesn't work like that.

well.. i just feel it's damn shame the empeg went out of production, love it and very happy to have mine going well

just need to have the handle reapired and adding a fan and the light kit

Indeed, but as I said above there isn't exactly a short supply of the ones that were made. If there were then people would be paying more than a couple of hundred quid for them when the come up for sale.

That is really cool, shame there's nothing like that in the UK. I'd be in there every evening and weekend!

They're franchising. Find a rich geek and get him interested.

The only rich geeks I know don't live in the UK.

A collective of moderately wealthy geeks?

I think it's a really smart idea, something I'd actually like to be a part of, if I had the money I'd probably give it a shot. Although I'd imagine the first one would have to be in London.

Ditto